Thursday, November 24, 2016

Stakes and conflicts need to
raise through your story. Whatever problem and stakes you start with, need to
get worse and worse, more and more desperate. And you should have a good idea
of how this is going to happen before you begin writing.

One of the ways it will rise is
your character’s own emotional investment. It’s the core of romances, the
stakes raise as the characters fall more and more in love with each other,
their emotional investment rises. Likewise, if your hero is a gruff, uncaring,
world-weary cowboy, he will undoubtedly meet someone weaker and more vulnerable
that he will protect, grudgingly at first, but who will then become a driving
motivation as the story progresses.

Another typical way for the
stakes it rise is that on your characters first (then often second and even
third) effort to solve their problems, they fail. A character who always
effortlessly succeeds is boring. No one can empathise with a flawless character,
because none of us are flawless. Seeing their failure, their reaction to it,
the way they fight to keep going, or maybe give up for a time, allows us to see
who they are. And the higher their highs and the lower their lows, the more of
them we see.

A character who has no emotional
investment, or who doesn’t react to things, internally or externally, is not
interesting to a reader. However if a reader can feel with the character,
empathise as completely as you can manage, then they will remember that story
and want to share it with everyone else.

Conflict Resolution

You have to resolve all the
conflicts in your story in a way that will satisfy the reader. That is not to
say they have to be happy endings, or the ending that the reader wants, but
they do have to be resolved. EG: Let’s say in the middle of the book, the main
character has to abandon hisbeloved dog
on the roof of a house in flood waters. He promises to go back for her. She’s
barking as he paddles away and he orders her to stay with tears rolling down
her face.

At some point in the book, even
if it is toward the very end, you have to resolve that conflict. Maybe the dog
is rescued by someone else, maybe he goes back for it, maybe he sees fly over
footage of the site and sees the dog is dead. However the reader needs to know
what happened to it, one way or another.

Loose ends leave readers feeling
uncomfortable. If people are uncomfortable, if they leave your book feeling
unsatisfied, they won’t come back and read your next book. So if you are leaving
things unresolved, only do so if you have a really good reason, if that is your
intention that readers feel that way.

Ultimately, you want to resolve
your novel in a way that leaves them with a strong emotion—you decide what that
emotion is, as the writer, but you want it to be intense. You want it to have
as much impact as you can possibly deliver. With happy endings, you may then
end with a mellower scene, something short to show everything has calmed down, or
that adventures are ongoing, or that everything is back to normal, but this palette
cleanser can’t be too long. It’s a reassurance—don’t let it drag on so long
that it weakens your final emotional impact.

NEXT WEEK - Part 9. Characters: Heroes.

The previous parts of the character development blog series can be found here:

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Stakes are what is at risk, or
the consequences of failure. If nothing is at risk and the hero doesn’t stand
to lose anything if they fail, why does the reader care? The stronger and more
powerful your stakes feel to the reader, the more they will care. However don’t
make the mistake of valuing quantity over quality. The lives of everyone on the
planet may seem like a big, cool stake to have—its EVERYONE on the planet,
right? But a man trying desperately to save the life of his newborn daughter,
or a sister trying to protect her little brother from an abusive, alcoholic
mother is going to have far more emotional impact on the reader and thus they
will be more invested in the story.

What is motivation?

I have noticed, while giving
feedback, quite a few of my fellow writers are confusing motivation and stakes.
They are often intrinsically connected. Different sides of the same coin. Take
for example the heroine saving her lover. Her MOTIVATION for saving him is that
she loves him so much she would die so he could live. What is at STAKE is his
life, and her future happiness. However don't be lazy and assume one
automatically provides the other.

What if the heroine is saving her
lover because he is the only one who knows who killed her daughter? What if she
is saving him for the pleasure of killing him herself? What if she is saving
him because he has the antidote to the poison that is killing her? As the
motivations change, so do the stakes. In every case, she is trying to stop a
man from dying. However the WHY alters what she will lose if she fails. He
won't just die, she'll lose her only lead in finding her daughter's killer, on
having revenge, of saving her own life.

What stakes matter to readers?

The most important thing is that,
whatever the stakes and motives are, they should matter to the main character. If
your plot is about a girl finding a neglected horse, there is a big difference
between a character who sort of thinks horses are cool and who loves horses
more than anything and is determined to dedicate her life to horse
rehabilitation. The driving motivation has to matter enough to the main
character that they can't just hand responsibility to someone else, or give up.
The character's passion will be mirrored by the reader, if it is done well.

Generally speaking, motivations
and stakes should also be perceived from the side of 'good'. EG: If your main
character's goal is to kill someone, they should have a reason readers can
relate to. If you tried to write a novel about a guy who wanted to raped and
murder the wife of the guy who stole his parking spot at work, the novel
probably wouldn't be super popular. It's hard to relate to someone who thinks
that way. However if you were writing about a man who was seeking revenge on
the guy who raped and murdered his wife because of a stolen parking spot, more
people would be invested.

Generally people want to read
about characters who are trying to help, protect and redeem, not people who are
trying to hurt, corrupt and destroy. There are exceptions to this rule, such as
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Even so, society so abhors
this kind of narrative, that in some places it can't be sold, or must be sold
shrink wrapped as if it were hardcore pornography.

Readers also
want to read about characters that resonate with them, whom they can empathise
easily with. This is why people generally like to read about people their own
age, their own gender and sometimes their own race (though this is more
difficult for underrepresented minorities, since there isn't the same volume of
works for them to choose from).

So when you are designing
character motives and building stakes, you need to take your target audience
into consideration. You want to take the problems they can relate to and make
them bigger. J.K Rowling does this in her books with surpassing mastery. She
takes that very real fear children have of having less than schoolmates and
siblings, as well as the fear of being punished unjustly by parents, and amplifies
it. It becomes an abused child living under the stairs, getting no gifts while
his cousin gets dozens, never having anything new or special. It is easy to
empathise with Harry instantly. Even if we had very good childhoods, we all
suffered those anxieties and J.K Rowling brings them all to the surface again
with breathtaking intensity.

In Harry Potter, the villains
also outnumber the allies. Conflict comes in from all sides, both from Harry's
enemies, as varied as they are, and his allies. The stakes and motives are
constantly shifting and growing. Which is why the series did so well.

NEXT WEEK - Conflict Escalation & Resolution.

The previous parts of the character development blog series can be found here:

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Your story needs more conflict.
That conflict then needs to be maintained properly, escalated and finally
resolved in a manner that has the strongest impact on the character and reader.

This conflict post for the character development series was originally going to cover conflict, stakes & motivation and Escalation & Resolution. It was so long, however, it has been broken up into three separate blog posts.

So welcome back to the character development series!

What is Conflict?

Once I instructed a fellow writer
that every scene needed to have some sort of conflict, mystery or development. A
week later she came to me and said 'I've been trying to do what you said, but it's
really difficult to make the characters argue in every scene.'

I was floored--partly by her
misunderstanding of the term 'conflict', but also that she would attempt to
follow such blatantly ludicrous advice. I asked if her favourite book had an
argument in every scene and why she would attempt to follow my advice when it
was clearly inaccurate. She wasn't sure, but when pressed she couldn't identify
any conflicts, in any scenes, other than arguments between characters.

So what is a conflict? Thefreedictionary.com
defines it as:

1.
A state of open, often
prolonged fighting; a battle or war.

2.
A state of disharmony
between incompatible or antithetical persons, ideas, or interests; a clash.

3.
Psychology A psychic struggle, often unconscious,
resulting from the opposition or simultaneous functioning of mutually exclusive
impulses, desires, or tendencies.

4.
Opposition between
characters or forces in a work of drama or fiction, especially opposition that
motivates or shapes the action of the plot.

A conflict could be inside the
character--guilt, shame, fear. It could be an external force the character is
fighting against--a fire, a storm, the cold, an earthquake. It could be another
character--the love interest, the villain, a misunderstanding, direct insult,
physical altercations, verbal altercations or simply emotional tensions.

And yes, you should try and have
conflict in every scene. Just don't always make that conflict an argument.

Three Types Of Conflict

Inner conflict is usually an emotion, thought or belief
that has a detrimental effect on a characters choices and actions. Maybe they
want to be brave and do the right thing, but fear stops them. Maybe they
believe they can’t do something, so they never try.

A good inner conflict is seeded
throughout a novel, then comes to a head in a critical scene, giving characters
a choice that allows them to overcome their conflict, or fail. Often, depending
on the emotional arc of the book, they will fail on their first attempt, then
succeed later.

EG:A man is deeply resentful of his ex wife. So
much so, he wishes she was dead. He arrives at her house to pick up their
children and sees the children are huddled on the lawn and the house is
burning. She is still inside. He can overcome his hostilities and run in and
save her... or he can fail and let her die.

Addictions, mental illness,
trauma and deeply ingrained cultural or religious beliefs can also be inner
conflicts—though often more difficult for people to overcome. EG: a man
choosing between heroin or his children, or a war veteran trying to trust her
brother when he promises her the hallucinations aren’t real.

Interpersonal conflict occurs between people. Romance novels often
rely heavily on the interpersonal conflict between the hero and heroine as
their relationship develops. There needs to be a lot of tension between them to
make their romance compelling to the reader. The relationship between the hero
and villain is also an interpersonal conflict and these are often the most
powerful, intense relationships we get to see in fiction. EG: Harry Potter and
Draco Malfoy, John McClane and Hans Gruber.

Interpersonal conflict can be a
central conflict in a novel, sustained from beginning to end, or it can be
short. A disagreement between two characters for a single scene. Conflict and
tension between characters is one of the best ways to engage and sustain reader
interest.

Consider ‘The Hunger Games’ where
every single relationship Katniss has, even with her allies, is fraught with
tension and conflict. And every time she does open up and trust someone, they
are wrenched away from her. Which usually then changes the conflict between her
and President Snow, or one of the other villains. I would argue The Hunger
Games nonstop conflict, without any room to breathe, is what made it so
successful and interpersonal conflict was the lion’s share of that.

Environmental conflicts are difficulties and dangers arising from
the surroundings. EG: Rain causing a laptop to die, a bushfire threatening
lives and homes, a hurricane knocking out power, a snake bite on a hiking
trail, a snow storm trapping tourists in a remote cabin. While all of the
dangers in The Hunger Games are controlled by man, the things within the arena
were environmental conflicts that Katniss had to overcome. The movie Cube (1997)
the characters are trying to survive the maze (environmental) and each other
(interpersonal).

The primary conflict in a story
can be environmental. Any catastrophic event is usually enough to base a whole
story around—though you would expect there to be inner conflict and perhaps
some interpersonal conflict as well. A good environmental conflict feels like
an interpersonal conflict. The environment feels like a hostile force. It’s not
a static backdrop. It breathes and hunts and devastates. We all sometimes feel
like it rained just because we hung out washing. Environments can be malicious.

Generally speaking, you expect to
find all three types of conflict in longer works. It’s difficult, in a well
written story, to leave one out. That is because we all experience all three of
these conflicts on an almost daily basis, just in minor forms. Trip and bash
your toe? Environmental conflict. Children won’t eat their dinner?
Interpersonal conflict. Choosing between a salad or burger for lunch? Inner
conflict.

Mysteries and Hooks

What is a hook?

Imagine you are a fisher and the
reader is a fish. You are at the end of the book and they are at the start.
Your goal is to draw them through the story to you. The hook is what pulls them
through the water/story. It is the element that keeps them reading.

The type of hooks you will use
will vary greatly depending on the genre and target audience.Often, hooks are promises the writer has made
to the reader in the blurb and the book’s cover. That is the first hook.
However you then need to have a fantastic hook in the first chapter, preferably
in the first line too. Something that will keep the reader turning the page to
see what happens next.

Next time you pick up a new book
and enjoy it, stop and ask yourself why you want to read more. Your answer will
probably start with the phrase: ‘I want to know X’ or ‘I want to see X’. For
you, that is the hook at this part in the story. Different readers will be
hooked in by different elements—which are again, generally about genre and
target audience.

However a good hook will general
involve a compelling character, a compelling conflict of some kind and a
question or mystery the reader wants the answer to.

Drawing the Reader Through The Story

Once you have a reader's
attention, you have to keep it. That means raising the stakes and creating new
hooks as the plot progresses. I think Karin Slaughter is the master of this.
Her crime thrillers draw you through, from start to finish, very easily.She is very good at jerking you backwards and
forwards, leading you to one conclusion, then providing fresh information that
forces you to look at the situation in a new light and question your earlier
conclusions.

She is also great at ending
chapters on cliff-hangers, so you feel compelled to start the next chapter,
just so you can find out what happens before you put the book down. Her books
are fast paced and intense. It's no wonder I usually read through them in a
single day.

Karin Slaughter's novels are told
from multiple POVs too. Which allows some characters to have information other
character's need. Sometimes characters keep information from the reader too.
Which allows her to build massive anticipation because we know a character is
walking into danger when the character doesn't. Or we know a problem could be
solved if two characters could just meet and share information. Or we know that
the hero was only a few feet shy of finding the unconscious victim... but
missed them and gave up the search moments too soon.

These all come back to raising
the stakes in your story. Which begs the question:

What are stakes? Come back next week to find out!

The previous parts of the character development blog series can be found here:

About Me

Jake Corvus is a prolific writer living on the gorgeous Sunshine Coast in Australia. Despite being in his mid-thirties, he is often mistake for being in his early teens. He loves writing horror, sci fi and fantasy, with a special interest in queer and inclusive fiction. He watches too many trashy horror movies to have any shred of self-respect, and lives with an alarmingly diverse array of disabled rescue animals, including snakes, frogs, shrimp, fish, cats, dogs and birds.
Jake's favourite dinosaur is the bagaceratops.